Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to Between Two Ledgers. I'm James Rose and today's guest is James Sundin. He's the co founder and chief evangelist at represent. He spent 16 years getting good at something most accountants dread, which is sales. It took me a while to work out what he actually does and it turns out that's completely on purpose. As you'll hear in this episode, he's a genuine sales machine who isn't afraid to pick up the phone. He packs out talks at conferences like accountex and he's the reigning pitch slap champion, which you'll hear a little bit more about.
The things we cover, why he built a brand designed to confuse people on purpose. How to win clients before you've even spoken to them, why accountants are brilliant at the work but terrible at talking about it, when to fire your worst clients, whether you should even chase growth at all. And the time he cooked a barbecue for 40 people to land a great client and a whole bunch more topics. And with that, I bring you James Sundin. Mr. James Sundin, thanks for joining me.
[00:01:00] Speaker B: My pleasure, Mr. Rose.
[00:01:03] Speaker A: Man, I feel like this should have been done earlier.
We've been chatting a lot and I hadn't had you on the podcast yet. I'm not sure why.
You were introduced to me through a very terrible person called Tom Johnson. Is our business development for Content Snare?
[00:01:21] Speaker B: Yes.
Well, I would say I think it's good that we're both now in each other's lives so we can ocean and support each other through the, the trials and tribulations. That is knowing Tom Johnson.
So Tom, for anyone that doesn't know him, has a really strange accent like I do. So Tom's some. Tom's British, originally from the uk and when tomorrow over in the uk, before he comes of run away, you know, buried his sins and you know, James took him ever so nicely under his wing and brought him into Content Snare. And Tom owned his own business in the uk. We used to have a lot of mutual clients and we've always geeked out together where it comes to sales, marketing, strategy, automations, all of the cool stuff behind that as well. So, yeah, we, we've always gotten like an absolute housing buyer mutual clients. But yeah, once again, James, thank you for saving the UK and you know, taking him over to us.
[00:02:17] Speaker A: Mate, brilliant.
No worries. He's actually turned out. Yeah, he's been a great person having on the team. I'm sorry to not keep going with the negativity around Tom, but yeah, it's been really awesome having having him on, but more about you, man. This is. I want. I want to talk about you and the way you help accountants and what you can help accountants with. I'll be honest, it took me quite a while to work out what you actually do.
[00:02:40] Speaker B: Thank you. Because there.
[00:02:41] Speaker A: I think it's because there are so many things.
[00:02:43] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:02:44] Speaker A: But I want to hear in your birds what you do. But most importantly, I heard that you were the Pitch Slap champion of 2024. It's like when you're, you know, the local chicken shop is like, this city's best chicken is 2016.
Like, I think you should take that sign down now, mate.
So tell me about the pitch slap
[00:03:07] Speaker B: and what do you do?
I love it. So in, I guess, in reverse order in that case. So pitch slap champion 2024 context, what pitch Slap is. So imagine a guy coming around with a microphone, a videographer with him shooting the microphone, the camera in your face whilst you're at the industry event and saying, you've got 10 seconds to pitch your business to. Camera coming out of nowhere, slapping you with a big foam hand. Pitch slap, camera in your face, Boom. Let's go. So, can't quite remember, off the top of my head, how many vendors were brave enough to put their name in the hats. However, 2014 was the. Sorry, 2024, not 2014. I know I've aged horrifically from working with accountants for 12 years, but, yeah, it's not quite that long ago.
But, yeah, that was the first year it was done. It was also the year where it was the people's vote. So it wasn't decided on by a group of judges. And obviously, as we know, judges can be bribed and persuaded and, you know, there's the whole political game to play there. But, yeah, the people's vote, the people's champion, that's kind of who I am. And that's kind of what happened in relation to the first part, James. So I love the fact because we do so many things that confuse you and it took you a while to figure that out.
That was an intentional part of our strategy when we went to market and the reason why.
So if you see this company doing, like all this amazing cool stuff, providing these epic results for clients, but you don't know what they do, what do you do?
You either go and ask them, which then generates your lead, or you go and ask somebody else, which then spreads your brand awareness.
[00:04:54] Speaker A: Interesting.
[00:04:56] Speaker B: The most backwards thing in the world, maybe, do. I keep at lucid and don't really give it away now, seriously, it really did the most backwards marketing strategy that's ever existed, but making it super clear and concise. So we do five different things for five different countries around the world, but always centered predominantly around accountancy practice. So we help them win their ideal clients and we help them deliver compliance, advisory and finance functions. We help them grow via acquisition and nail the transition. We help them automate manual processes, getting into that and unpacking that in a little bit of time, if you'd like to do so. But lastly, we help them exit. So either by selling their firm or by replacing themselves in part or in full, whereby they can work two, three days a week, make a significantly higher net profit and get to enjoy this beautiful thing outside of work called life.
But that's what we make possible. So win, deliver, choir, automate, exit.
Love it.
[00:06:01] Speaker A: Awesome. I would like to start at the very beginning. We're not going to have the time to get through all of them, unfortunately. But I believe that where we should take this chat is the sales. The winning part.
[00:06:14] Speaker B: Yeah, sure.
[00:06:16] Speaker A: I am told you're a sales machine and not, not afraid to pick up the phone.
And I believe you recently spoke at Accountex and two things caught my eye apparently. I also heard that they were basically standing room only talks that you gave. So it's very, very popular. Not surprising.
Two things call my eye were win clients before you've spoken and say less, win more.
So let's dig into that.
The other note I said here is you're not afraid to pick up the phone. Let's assume that accountants are friends. Pick up the phone in the context of what you say from Cool.
[00:07:01] Speaker B: So what we talk about first, picking up the phone,
[00:07:06] Speaker A: selling accounts, selling and especially win clients before you've spoken, that was, that was a really big standout to me, I think especially because it's nice to have half the work done before you speak to someone, right?
[00:07:19] Speaker B: Correct. Absolutely, I think so. I think first and third look at the problems within industry. So we deliver service to firms across five different countries. Australia, South Africa, usa, Canada, uk.
The countries that we've got clients in. And we're actively servicing those clients in various different ways across the portfolio of services we provide.
Thinking about when the problem, typically with firms, and this is during this series, is pretty standardized across the globe.
Firms are phenomenal at what they do for businesses. Whether that be tax, whether that be record keeping, whether that be advisory, whether that be reduction of cost, whether it be helping a business make better decisions, pay less tax, pay themselves more, whatever it might be.
But they're absolutely terrible at talking about it. There's a problem, there's a blocker. They're very, you know, very professional. Absolutely awesome human beings what accountants are. But they're very reserved. And it's the reason why from a global perspective, the vast majority of growth for firms happens from referrals because they're not involved in those sales conversations until somebody comes to them and says, hey, you seem pretty dope, you work with X, can you help me as well? So there's a, there's a confidence there.
Here's how I've always grown before.
Here's how I'm going to continue to grow. The seven most expensive words in business. This is how we've always done it.
Okay, cool. Like in a world of geo, SEO, in a world of automation, Amazon delivery, self service tools and AI taking over the world before force kind of happens, like what are you going to go and do to win more of your ideal clients?
I think it's, it's changed from a pick up the phone, just have a sales conversation to actually let's enrich that client as to who we are, the value that we can provide, the energy that we have, you know, not just buzzwords like culture, but the energy that we actually have as normal human beings.
That's what attracts people to want to work with us. It's only after they get a good energy about who we are can we then be like, hey, here's our credibility.
Most importantly, here's the social proof, here's the problems that you've got. That another business just like yours had that we've been able to fix is their story, their journey, how we've supported them and it's what the output is.
Loads of firms go, hey, like I want to go win new clients, let's go pump loads of money into SEO and ads and ad spend. Oh yeah, it didn't work. Yeah, can't win. Clients have to wait for referrals downtack.
These are real things that.
But I think every firm needs to start with that foundation. So how do you get a pre qualified client coming to you without getting too crazy and sexy into automation stuff? Now me and you and especially Tom Johnson has mentioned can absolutely geek out on this kind of stuff, right? But start with the basic fundamentals.
Think about your social media profiles, think about your website, what happens when somebody lands on that? Because that's where you want to drive people to, right?
Look at it through your customer's eyes. Does it speak to them? Does it talk to them? Does it show them that you are the best person doing what you do to manage and support their business.
Great. Start with the foundation first and make sure wherever you're bringing people to, like I said, your social media, your profile, your website, wherever that might be, let's make sure that's crisp, make sure it's clean, make sure it's feature rich with what you do and the difference you make for other businesses.
Let's look at the foundation and let's build momentum and then we can really step and that's how we deliver what we do as part of our services. But you know, this is really great free advice. And you know, not every firm is right for us. Not every firm open quarters. And it's the reason why I like to give free documents, advice, structures, support, like generally. James I'm a huge, huge advocate for what firms can do if they start talking about the value. And it's the reason why I give quite a lot of my IP away for free.
[00:11:34] Speaker A: The website side of things is an interesting topic because I feel like a lot of, for a lot of firms, especially ones that rely on referrals, never bother even like they throw something up, it's just like a placeholder, you know, so when someone actually Googles them, you know, they hear about them, they Google them, they're like, oh yeah, cool. They're like a, it's a tick box.
And yeah, I feel like, like you've alluded to, it can be so much more. I don't think it needs to be as big a deal as some people think it is. You know, it's really that hard to build like a website that talks about you and the reasons people work with you and the results you've got for other people.
Because, you know, like, first impressions matter a lot more than I think people like care to. I don't know, it's just, to me it's, it's something that should not be neglected, especially by, even by accountants who are probably going to get these clients anyway.
So I'm guessing then like that is the first thing you generally work with people on is getting their message out and sort of displaying that into a way that it could be written on the website.
[00:12:38] Speaker B: Absolutely. I think the first thing to look at is who do you actually want to win business from?
You've got really, you've got a split camp here, right? You've got firms that can't win clients.
But more often than not, the problem with firms is they have no problem winning clients, but they're winning the wrong clients. So they Become inundated, overworked, stressed, pressurized, not enough hours in the day and not winning the right ones.
Actually if you're in that quite a luxurious position, what you should be doing is getting rid of what we call your shit list.
The clients that aren't right for you, that don't pay you on time, that don't respect you, that come with all of the information last minute, regardless of the great automations you've got in content snap.
But you need to think about churning those clients if you don't have the right ones. If you need to think about winning clients, what is the point in going through all of the pain and struggle, the boarding process, working with these difficult clients that are not in line with your ideal client profiles.
What's the point in going, winning those, just to be able to do so, like set you up for success either by changing the clients that you work with, improving that process, improving your net profit, your take home what you pay yourself, the people that you can afford to hire and bring into your firm, the tech projects that cost money that you really want to do but you don't have the cash really available for it all because clients don't pay you on time. Right. So let's work out that ideal client profile first and then let's build and create the environment that's conducive to attracting that client to you. Once they have eyes on what you've got to share with them from a webpage, from social media account, whatever that means.
[00:14:26] Speaker A: I, yeah I, I totally on board with this and I love seeing in, in like Facebook groups or accounting communities when someone says that they're firing a client, it's just like, it's such a, like oh yes, like such a feel good moment. I feel like a lot of people probably think they can't do that given you know, how many clients I've got or whatever. I think but the solution to that is always if you can replace them, if you're comfortable that you can replace them with someone better, then it's going to make that decision a lot easier, right. To let go of those people. So coming back to say someone does, now that entry point of the website is sorted out, how do we get away from relying on referrals? How do they get more people to, to their website to be aware of them?
[00:15:13] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. You then think so you've got the right foundations, you then you start building that momentum. So the easiest thing to do is work out so you know your ideal clients, you know what they look like, the Size, the tenor over the business, their personalities, the type of industries that they're in, all of these different variables. So we absolutely go to town on planning that, creating the right environment for them when they land there.
It's really, really simple. A lot of people over complicate this. James, where do your clients hang out?
Where are those businesses? Yeah, where are those businesses? If you are a big fan of in person networking, cool. Have a really super slick, really good looking on brand business card with a QR code for your LinkedIn profile, for your Instagram profile, your TikTok profile. Depends on what kind of type of firm you are and what you're into. Right. Where do you want to direct people's attention to that's going to support that journey and that experience?
Even if you had a different business card, let's say you deal with and you specialize with 4 different sector verticals, have 4 different pockets with 4 different business cards with 4 different QR codes on and the landing page that it takes for that business card goes to an E commerce business. If you're talking with an E commerce business owner, that one goes to, you know, a professional services page. If one of you things is professional services businesses, you get the point, right. So where are you going to take those people to? Where are they going to land? If that's in person networking, don't go out there, get it. The more that you put in, make sure you're not pitch stopping people. I feel pretty well qualified to be able to say that. Right. Just talk to people like a normal human being. Same situation if you're on social media when you're prospecting people on social media, yeah, just be a normal human being like everyone. The icky AI chatbot comments.
Goodness me, it makes my skin call every time I see them.
I'd love to call them out and say thanks Bob. When people comment on purchase, right? But if you're going to do it in a digital way, great. Just be a normal human being.
People will be attracted to good human energy.
You can then look at other different ways. If you then want to put ad spend into play, make sure your ad is crisp and clean. Don't just do an ad by itself, don't just go great, I'm just going to put some LinkedIn on Facebook ads together and I'm going to do that as a single silo.
Be specific in who you're marketing to.
When you're bringing their problems to the forefront of their mind and you're telling them what their problems are before they've even spoken to you and you're doing so in a way, and you're articulating that in a better way than they can share it with you. That gives you credibility. And then that gives you the ability to be able to say, here's how we fix that problem.
String together a direct mail campaign.
Send somebody a handwritten letter with a business card attached. Hey, put it in a box where when they open it, it explodes confetti. Like, do whatever's cool with your brand, right?
But do that with a handwritten letter. Then have a LinkedIn ad, then a Facebook ad, and then as a step in process, if you're comfortable to do so, pick up the phone, be a human being in the digital world, because that's what people care about, human interaction. They care about how you've made them feel. And if you're taking the time to do the make handwritten letter and pick up the phone like a human being as part of your cadence or process, these things really help. But be specific, be targeted, and be absolutely ruthless in a really cool, good energy kind of way.
[00:18:52] Speaker A: And see, what I like is that none of this is magic, right? This is all things I guess we know we should be doing and we overcomplicate. We think we got to do it everything and. But it's like if you just look at it and go, you know, this one gels with me the most. I want to give that a go start somewhere.
What I love the direct mail chat. Like, I. God, I would love to be able to make direct mail work for our business. Our, like, sorry, chunky mail, not direct mail, chunky mail. So it's like actually like an expensive thing that's costly to get to the person.
For us, our amount contest is so cheap, we just cannot make the economics of that work. But I'd love to be able to send and some stuff like that. I remember one classic example. I can't remember the marketer, but it was they sent like a little wheelie bin with some like, money in it. It's like, stop throwing your money away or something.
So funny. There's just so many cool examples of that. But yeah, like going back even further, you talked about, like, you know, where those people you've defined who you want to work with, you know, where do they hang out? And I feel like it's so rare for me to meet accountants that have that dialed in, you know, and when they do, they seem to be fairly successful. Like, I know someone who they work with a certain industry and they just go to all of that industry's events to the point where they are now speaking on stage at, let's say it was a lawyer event. You know, they're talking on a legal, legal stage about accounting things that affect lawyers and they do very well out of that. Like they've become the sort of default person that people recommend within this industry because they're just so ingrained. And it's not like this guy is not a sales machine. He's just a guy that wants to help and probably started helping in a low, lower commitment way on, just by sharing things on LinkedIn and, or in communities and getting noticed. And you know this sort of spins, it's like a flywheel, right? Like you learn more about industry by serving more of that client. And you talked about ads and speaking directly to their problems, you know, their problems because you're doing it all the time. Right. So like all this work, flywheels off each other is what I'm trying to say.
[00:21:04] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:21:06] Speaker A: And so other examples, you know, actually I kind of don't really want to share their niches or anything but it's just the same. I've heard that same play in three different ways now. I've spoken a woman who, who goes to a certain type of event because that's what she specializes in, has the, the stand. You know, like I think a lot of accountants are probably seeing the, the vendors at like a zero con or something as like a thing that someone else does.
Whereas you know, there's nothing stop an accountant going and having their stand at Farm Con or I don't know, whatever.
[00:21:41] Speaker B: That's, that's, that should be a great day out. Next time I'm crossing those. Me, you and Tom Johnson.
We'll take little one hour.
[00:21:49] Speaker A: My brother in law goes to. I can't remember what it's called. Farm. Fantastic.
Yeah, even better than farmcon and it sounds great. And honestly I feel like I wish I was selling there because the fees for their stand are about a third of what you spend in an accounting conference for a huge thing. I'm like, you spend how much on that stand? Oh my lord, that's so cheap.
[00:22:11] Speaker B: Do you know? It is.
I think the, the environment's really important. So if you've got like four or five paypales as you stand, I'm glad it's a little bit cheaper. But yeah, I think it would fit with the aesthetics 100% but yeah.
[00:22:25] Speaker A: So I don't know, I think hopefully people listening to that think, you know, maybe that is worth me doing what Would you say to someone who's like, you know, I don't need more clients. We just get enough coming in from referrals.
[00:22:36] Speaker B: Great.
[00:22:39] Speaker A: I feel like a lot of accountants would say that, though, you know, like,
[00:22:42] Speaker B: of course they would. So here's the thing, right?
See, so your business that you set up, you built it for a purpose. Is it fulfilling that purpose in. In the more closed words of the notorious brg, more money, more problems.
It's always nice when I get to, you know, just drop that on people. Right?
[00:23:04] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:23:04] Speaker B: But here's the. Here's the thing. And this is the problem. This is the problem from a society perspective. You probably wouldn't expect a guy that one of, you know, one of five things that he does is help people to win business in more variety of lines. Right. You probably wouldn't expect to hear this from me, James, but I've been in meetings with clients where they've turned around and said they brought me in to help them grow, and they told me what they want to grow by. And I just. You don't need me for that.
Like, you could stand with a. You could stand with like an. A board on. In a shopping center with, I'm an accountant on the front of it, and grow by more than that. Yeah. If you've got a crisp, clean pitch, you don't need me for that. And I was like, guys, why do you actually want to grow for? I was like, just tell me if I'm, like, if I'm wrong here and if, you know, I'm overstepping boundaries or whatever. But hold on. You, you know, you've got the money you want in the world. You've got a nice house, you've got a nice car, you go on nice holidays with your family. Like, you've got cash in the bank. You're not worried about making payments.
Do you need more clients or do you need actually more time in life to do things outside of work?
Like, why do we always have to grow? Why do we have to grow and continue to grow, otherwise we're taking a step backwards. Why have we let society, which we are responsible for, why have we let it ingrain this into our brains?
Like, hey, like, you're growing by referrals. You're happy with that. No stress, no drama.
What happens if that stops? But generally, what's the impact to your business if that starts?
You know, you're being reliant and your.
Your stability of your business is on something that you are reactive to and have no control over.
I mean, hey, like, accountants mitigate risk for a living, man.
Yeah.
If you're not mitigating that risk, then that's cool. But if you don't want to do anything about it, no straps. I think that's.
Yeah, I'm really passionate about that. So I like it.
[00:24:59] Speaker A: That's. That's very good. And I. That is something. Another thing I see a lot of in the accounting communities are people exactly that position. Like, they don't want necessarily more money, they just want their life back.
And I think obviously you can put in place automation, Content Snare will do it for you. No, not really. There'll be some. But I think back to the sales side. If you're actually good at sales, the.
What I said before, if you were able to land more of your ideal clients, you can trim the clients that are taking up all your time and actually draining your life away. Because, like, it only takes one bad client to make you hate your business and hate your life and depending on the kind of person you are. But I'm like this, right? Like, if I get an email or something, that just pisses me off. It's like a little brain worm with hooks on it and it's straight in there. Like, it just won't shut up for like two hours.
[00:25:52] Speaker B: I can't believe that person.
[00:25:54] Speaker A: It's like, I'm not achieving anything by being mad about it, but that's just how some people are, me included. So you just need those people out of your life.
[00:26:02] Speaker B: Yeah, I think taking a step back, you know what's really, really nice, and you kind of get, you know, listeners or viewers of this, we kind of get our business now and how we do it.
So, like, when people turn around and go, yeah, go viral referral. Don't want to change it, don't want to do anything. I just want more time, you know, I want to do less work, have more time at the business. All right, cool. Do you want to make more profit in the process?
Like, yeah, people want to make more profit asking a stupid question, James. I'm like, all right, cool. I'm serious.
So you said about, you know, contents there and doing that, like. James, like, I'm. Well, I have to say this. I say this to our clients all the time. We use contents now within our process where we're helping firms to deliver.
Like, there's genuinely case studies, you know, on our website, on my LinkedIn profile, you know, we drink our own champagne. There's case studies that we've helped firms to go down from absolutely stressed in a Complete and utter nightmare. Overworked, not making enough profit, let down by team members.
With what we do with Content Snare, we use Content Snare as the tool to be able to sometimes retrieval of information and then we do the work.
One of our firms in particular is now down to a three day work in the week, making a 65% net profit on all of her compliance.
So do you want to grow or do you want to make more profit and do less work? Yeah, but that's our delivery service, so kind of makes sense as to how that works and fits together now. All of them.
[00:27:30] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.
I think you may need to come back to talk about deliver and the automation side on another podcast. But in the meantime, like let's say just so I know we've covered a little bit of this already, but if accountant does want to get out there and actually start generating like where, like some, some real lead flow that's not tied to referrals. Yeah, just laying on me where, where, what other things can we do? Where should we start? We sort of spoken about where to start like go to where the, where the target market are. But what are some more examples?
[00:28:05] Speaker B: Yeah, I would look inwards firstly on the individual because everyone's different and that's what makes the world fabulous.
We've all got different feelings, thoughts, emotions, strengths, weaknesses. That's what makes it cool. Right? This thing called life.
Where is your confidence?
Where is, where are you at your best?
Because again with what you said earlier on Jade, I literally teach you've got all these different channels that you can go to pick to be consistent.
When I presented Standing room only last week at Accountex, like on the presentation that I did how to win a million pounds new business without chasing anyone or I did that, I was like, oh, here's like loads of different channels from like partners for networking, from like email campaigns, from ad spend, from LinkedIn, social media, like here's loads of these different channels that you should go at Pick two, be consistent but find the ones that you're most comfortable with.
Some people even, you know, you said earlier on about a firm that, you know, you didn't say the industry but they've kind of like niched and they're just like the go to person within that industry because they just go to everything. They're known, they're visible, they've seen, most importantly do a really great job.
Great sales isn't being salesy.
Great sales is, you know, this great work called Indifference.
If anyone's ever read the book the Soft Lock not giving the.
If you've not read it, read it over and over and over again because that will teach you indifference.
And what you don't need to be is pushy. What you don't need to be a salesy. The best sales people are like, yeah, yeah, I can help with that. Sweet.
Who else I do it for?
And then the great thing is people don't actually do give it down as to what your services are, which is the most counterintuitive thing. They care about what that makes possible for them. That's what they care about. So all you need to do is talk about your clients and the problems that they had and how you help them. That's all you need to do in a sales project. And that would just be a chill for that cheating baby.
Do what you're confident with. I don't. James, want to turn around, give everyone a stock answer and go, yeah. Find out, like, where all of the networking events for all of the industries that you're in are and go to every single one of them.
That's. That's pretty obvious. But you might not be confident in yourself to be able to go and do that. You want to work towards that and build your confidence. Go to a few and then review it and then work with somebody to help you build that confidence and develop your skill. Great. Okay, cool. No worries. But if you're not and you don't want to do that, the chances are you're probably not going to do it. So find the channel. If you want to win more of your ideal clients, find out where your clients hang out. Not just literally and physically, but could be even digitally as well.
Look at the channel that you're most confident in, then commit to two channels, but be consistent.
Hopefully that helps you.
[00:31:10] Speaker A: Yeah, no, absolutely. Love it. And a couple of things on that is, like, if you pick something you're going to be heavily resistant to, what you're going to do is hate your life again. Right? Like, say, I know people think like, oh, I need to go to events. Like you said, pick all the, like, it's generic advice. Someone, some, you know, influencer is like, you got to win more business, you got to go to all the events, blah, blah, blah. And someone's like, man, I don't want to do that. Like, you don't necessarily have to. Like, there is an argument to be made for pushing beyond your comfort zone, of course, but I think you don't necessarily. If you're an introvert and you try to force yourself to go to every, every event. You're probably gonna burn yourself out real quick. I do know a couple of local accountants shout out to Jackie Trumper who's a Content Snare fan. But she has said, you know, she, she goes, she's an introvert and goes to events and it's become like a personal challenge thing for her, you know, which I think is awesome. Not everyone's got to do that though, right? Some people are going to look at standing on stage and go like absolutely not. But there are many other things you can do that are lower impact that you can start on. I would recommend. I guess we're just giving people our reading list now but I. There's a book called Traction. It's actually made for startups and I'm not talking about the traction. You probably know it's which is the, you know, the. Gabriel. No, no, not that one.
There's another traction just to confuse things by. I think it's Gabriel Weinberg. Traction. Gabriel.
[00:32:37] Speaker B: It's.
[00:32:38] Speaker A: It says how any startup can achieve explosive customer growth. Now I know you're not a startup, however, basically all Traction is, is a list of marketing channels. It's like trade shows and events and partnerships and SEO and whatever. It's, it's like slightly older now. It's not going to talk about AI, SEO or whatever, but what's good about it is just the framework. It's like here's a bunch of channels for you to think about, a bunch of ways for you to get clients.
Here's a framework for prioritizing them and go and run tests. Here's a little framework for running tests and seeing which ones gel with you or that you can make work.
[00:33:14] Speaker B: I love it. James. I just thought something, and it might be something that's in your listeners heads we'd be talking through.
The one question that comes up is I don't know where to find my ideal clients.
So we say go where they are, they go up. We don't know where they are.
This is so simple.
Do you have any clients like that already?
Typically it's a yes. And the reason why it's a yes is because you wouldn't say you want to work with more of that type of client if you didn't already work with. Right.
So cool. If you don't know where they are, go and speak to that client and go and ask them where they hang out.
Go and ask them. If you were going to meet an accountant, where would you meet them?
Where would you be like cool with a conversation if you met somebody like a networking Event. Where would you look for an accountant online? How would you find them? What was the process?
Was a process that he went through with us.
Even better yet, James, arrange a Google Meet, a Zoom or teams call, whatever he is using, ask the client for help, record it.
Great. You've got absolutely dope transcripts with all of the answers in. So you don't need to remember anything. Write stuff down and then you're like, hey, right now I'm going to put this into GPT or Claude or whatever product is you using. Various different ones are available and be like, hey, help me build a go to market for this particular customer niche, right? So these are really simple things that you can do with off the shelf AI. We're talking AI use cases now as well. But your existing clients know the answers to every problem or every question that you've got.
[00:34:59] Speaker A: You are absolutely speaking my language now. Like oh wow. Like I'm like, who would have thought that talking to customers can get you good information? It's crazy how many people don't though. Like this has literally been our playbook from day one, right? Like when we launched Content Snare, we spoke to web designers, got all this kind of information. When we started noticing accountants using Content Snare, I mean the first thing was like all right, who are the influencers in this space? Who are, what events do they go to? What newsletters or publications or magazines do they read? Like what do they call themselves on LinkedIn?
Like what are their titles? Whatever, like what, how do they describe themselves?
You know, are there Facebook groups, blah blah, blah. And then the same thing like we, we survey. We've spent plenty of surveys over the time that literally ask these kind of questions of our customers. Of course you do it in the one on one stuff as well. Much more highly personalized. I guess we being a software business have to be somewhat volume based at times. So we have to do the slightly less personal surveys. But man, like the amount of people that like give up their time to, to answer a few questions that are insanely helpful for us is incredible. But like yeah, the recorded calls or whatever just to ask these questions. I really like what you said. Like what was the process of finding us? How did you find us? How did you, what other thing did you compare other accountants? Where did they fall down? What made you choose us? God, some of the most insightful chats you'll ever have and feed into that marketing before later, sorry, that we were talking about before on the website like quotes and testimonials and case studies on your existing customers. So maybe that's the first thing right there is go and talk to like five of your ideal customer who you're currently working with, and, and record them and go with a preset set of questions, all of those things we've spoken about, and more, and feed it into AI.
[00:36:52] Speaker B: There you go.
It's really, really simple. And I think for a lot of businesses, it's around the strategy, it's around the positioning.
It's that fine detail that turns it from hitting words to here's a journey and here's how you're then inviting the reader to be able to learn more points, but is enriching them as to who you are. That's how when they come to you, you're really confirming their buying decision. You're facilitating their sale as opposed to selling them. And that's how things back to their initial point.
How do you win business before you've even spoke to somebody? That's exactly how boom.
[00:37:33] Speaker A: We've come full circle, which is, I think is a great place to end it. I just have one question that I am told I need to ask you about.
[00:37:40] Speaker B: Cool.
[00:37:40] Speaker A: I don't know if this is a sensitive question or not. It was just presented without any extra context that some barbecue you had with clients.
[00:37:48] Speaker B: Yeah, Tom Johnson was. Tom Johnson was one of them.
[00:37:54] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:37:58] Speaker B: You get this, right?
You're a good human.
You've got a sparkly personality, you like to have fun.
Right. You've got a good sense of humor.
All things Tom's told me I can't.
But no, we were very early stages in rack present. I think we're like our first year still intentionally trying to confuse the lrfo marketplace for the reasons mentioned earlier on. And we're like, hey, you got to be really good idea. You know, people are going seeing clients and doing little road trips and whatever else was like, let's do a barbecue.
What? Let's do a barbecue. I was like, yeah, let's pick a couple of clients and just be like, yeah, we're going to come to you. We'll hold our ass. We're going to do barbecue. So we did our first one with one of our clients, Mizuma.
Lucy Cohen is not only the founder and CEO of Nazuma, which is the UK's largest female founder of the Cantus, they've got certain like 5, 000 clients at least. He's also the president of AAT, so known globally, really highly respected, one of many clients that we work with over on this side of the pond. So to speak, on this side of the world. James. But I was like, yo, Lucy got this idea. James, shoot. How many people in your office? 40. James. I was like, sweet. You know, I've got a B. Technical diplomational code.
Yeah.
I'm trade chef as well. Right. So, yeah, genuinely great fun at barbecue. I was like, how about we come to you? We do a barbecue for some people just to kick this off as part of a press release and partnership that we did. And she was like, dope. Game on. So we did. We did a warm up with David Addison and Catherine at Utopia, which Tom Johnson came along to as well. So we did like a kind of warm up in. In David's back garden, like the day beforehand. But then, yeah, I was like barbecuing for 40 people. Thinking halfway through, whilst I'm absolutely melting in the beaming sunshine and at Barbie, I was like, why did this idea ever come and happen? But you know what? It is great. Let's focus. Yeah. Nobody got food poison. Everyone get fed, everyone's happy. I think it was a really great, fun way to smell the partnership.
[00:40:06] Speaker A: Boom.
I. Yeah, events are like, I don't know, small events, I guess. I don't know if you count 40 or small, but I do find small events are a really lovely way to, I don't know, get to know people. It sort of ties into everything we're talking about before you. This example was just a meta partnership, but I mean, we've just had little, little breakfasts or whatever with key customers that turns into like discussion about industry problems and it turns into getting incredible feedback for our products that we can feed back into it.
Getting that language of the, like, learning about your customers more like.
Yeah. I think breakfasts are small events are a totally easy, amazing way to help your business.
[00:40:52] Speaker B: Yeah. J. I love that change. You've just given a really great idea to absolutely everyone that's listening here.
What does James do with his customers and content stack customers? Just like you go and then do that with your clients.
You just.
[00:41:09] Speaker A: Yeah, well, that's the thing.
[00:41:10] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:41:12] Speaker A: This is very. It carries over like you just wear a software product, but all the same stuff.
[00:41:16] Speaker B: It.
[00:41:17] Speaker A: It carries over to. To clients type work as well.
[00:41:20] Speaker B: Good human energy, mate. It's. It's contagious and it brings people to us. Right. People as well.
[00:41:26] Speaker A: Bought 100%.
James. Mate, this has been bloody awesome. I want to know where people can go to. To find out more about you. Follow your journey.
[00:41:36] Speaker B: Cool. As far as I'm aware, I am the only James Sundin in the world. So that is S U N D R N if you want to Find me on LinkedIn. Other than that, if you want to go to Our website is represent.global.
represent global.
We said we were global.
[00:41:54] Speaker A: So, yeah, I'm incredibly jealous that you're the only one of you in the world. There's like eight of me just in my city. Right. Like, it's one of the most common frigging white person names.
[00:42:08] Speaker B: I mean, I feel like there could be a Chesney Hawks quote coming on there. Other than that. Other than that. I know you potentially fishing for compliments, James, but I.
The one and only James Rosemary.
[00:42:20] Speaker A: Boom. And we'll end right there.
[00:42:22] Speaker B: Cheers, James.
[00:42:23] Speaker A: This has been awesome.
[00:42:24] Speaker B: Thanks.
